Volume 11, Number 12 · January 2, 1969
Survivors
By Neal Ascherson
Living and Partly Living
by Jiri Mucha
McGraw-Hill, 224 pp., $5.95
Legends of Our Time
by Elie Wiesel
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 197 pp., $5.95
Z
by Vassilis Vassilikos
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 406 pp., $6.95
There are those survivors of political disaster whose experience is like that of a man trapped in the air-raid cellar of a bombed house: an eyeless, troglodyte's underworld to which, none the less, there faintly penetrate the sounds of the daylight street above, following its normal middle-earth concerns. Such is the experience of Jiri Mucha, who survived the coal mines and uranium mines of Czechoslovakia under Stalin. And there are those who have survived the nuclear explosion itself, the total holocaust, so that there no longer exists a world to return to: here is the place of Elie Wiesel, revisiting the metaphysical crater where once there existed European Jewry. Lastly, there are those whom the blast scorches and bruises but leaves still upright, still with the breath to yell back in fury and outrage. This is the category of Vassilis Vassilikos, the young Greek novelist and left-winger who watched the rise of fascism in Greece before the coup of the Colonels and must now live abroad.
Review, 1773 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |